1 million pounds and counting

In 1998 with grant assistance from the Jefferson Solid Waste Management District in St. Louis, the staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden initiated the first effort to collect plastic gardening containers. The garden’s membership of 30,000 responded enthusiastically and with curiosity to learn the Garden’s intent to recycle the containers into molded plastic lumber. After collecting 10,000 pounds of containers in 12 hours over three separate Saturdays, the Garden staff was convinced that this was not only productive but passionately desired by the public.

That initial response started yearly collections that were open to the public, growers, garden centers, landscapers and anyone else who puts a plant in the ground.

Working with the public was not the easy way to begin this effort. A smarter move would have been to work with the green industry and manage the collection volume.

The container collection efforts quickly surpassed 30,000 pounds per year as the volume increased along with the labor required to handle the containers. The Saturday events turned into weekends for three months starting in May. The volume increased to 75,000 pounds in 2005. Garden volunteers and master gardeners provided the manpower to collect and sort the containers.


Industry involvement
In 2006, independent garden centers began to inquire if they could participate by holding separate collections. A local waste hauler agreed to provide 30-yard roll-off trash containers, to transport the collected containers back to the recycling site at the Garden and to re-supply empty ones. Starting satellite collection sites at garden centers worked well and brought customers back into the stores.

The challenge was sorting the mixed plastic into types that could be processed into recycled products. The first attempt to sort plastic from the roll-off containers involved 100 volunteers and six paid staff during a six-weekend period during May and June. Sorting the containers was not a popular activity on hot afternoons so an alternative method was needed. The solution was to use separate recycling trailers that enabled consumers to sort their containers into the appropriate plastic at the time they dropped off the containers.

As part of a 2007 pilot program using three recycling trailers purchased with donated funds from wholesale grower Monrovia in Azusa, Calif., consumers were willing to pre-sort plastic into marked bins with an 80 percent accuracy rate based on reading recycling symbols on the containers. This reduced sorting significantly.

The program now uses 21 recycling trailers distributed to  12 garden centers that collect containers over a six-month period from April through September. The garden centers transport and exchange full trailers for empty ones during the collection period.

Steven D. Cline is director of the Center for Home Gardening, Missouri Botanical Garden, (314) 577-9561; Steven.cline@mobot.org; www.mobot.org.